What is an Information Age?
From the printing press to the internet, the spread of information has changed the world. How do we recognise an age defined by it?
‘It seems uncontroversial to say that “every age was an age of information”’
Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and author of In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship (Princeton University Press, 2026)
Given that humans have long communicated content through the means available to them, it seems uncontroversial to say that ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’, as Robert Darnton did in 2000. It is much more difficult to assess whether and when those living in the past might have thought they were living in an ‘Information Age’.
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